82 Desire

wouldn’t report this visit to David Bacardi, and gasped as David’s face came up on her mental movie screen. He and Douglas Seaberry were cut from the same cloth.
    They were both superior specimens; in fact they looked rather alike. They were smooth as K-Y jelly, confident as Marlboro men; and there was something else. What was that quality she hated so much in David?
    She let her mind go blank. Oh, yes—an unhesitating willingness to swat any fly that landed on his lunch. How had she escaped Seaberry’s wrath? Probably she hadn’t—he might very well call David, and they’d probably hit it off so well they’d go to lunch and think up whole new ways to torture her. Maybe these corporate guys were all like that.
    Maybe she should go out with her neighbor, the unemployed actor.

Eighteen
    TALBA TOOK THE bus to work on the days her mama worked. She never boarded the 82 Desire without going into some flight of the imagination. Just the sight of the name on the front got her revved up. It had to be the most poetic damn bus in the world. Sometimes she reflected on how lucky she was actually to live on the Desire line; sometimes she thought about the poem she was going to write about it one day, trying out phrases and half-formed ideas. One day it occurred to her that it would make a round, resonant name for her first volume of poetry. Eighty-two Desire. Now that had a ring to it.
    And some days, when real life overwhelmed poetry, it still kicked off a tangent—usually an obsessive, angry focus on her own desires. Today was like that.
    She had awakened in a cold sweat, dogged by guilt. She really should have solved this disk thing yesterday. She shouldn’t have agreed to go out with Darryl when she didn’t yet have the files. She shouldn’t have gone out with Darryl at all, no matter how happy it made her mama. She certainly shouldn’t have lied to Lamar.
    She went and splashed cold water on her face, but that only worked for a minute. The same obsessive thoughts kept circling in her head, wouldn’t leave even when Miz Clara came in and asked about her date, something she’d never done before in her life. Talba felt like crying and she didn’t really know why.
    Riding the 82 Desire was clarifying. What I want , she thought, is never to have heard of Gene Allred and his stupid client. What I want is out of this. I just want to go home and pull the covers over my head.
    What I don’t want is the damn fifteen hundred dollars.
    And yet she did.
    But that wasn’t the worst of it—she was in it now, whether she wanted the money or not.
    The passenger across the aisle was having a coughing fit that shouldn’t have been allowed outside a hospital. She got up and moved toward the back. She was feeling too vulnerable to do battle with germs today. She had to save her energy for her own psyche.
    The truth was, she was a little afraid. Life had become uncertain. She was afraid she couldn’t handle all the effort and hassle and—frankly—the fear that came with a new man. She was afraid to break up with Lamar. She was afraid Darryl wouldn’t call again.
    Then, too, she was afraid for her life.
    She hadn’t the least idea who this mystery client was. And her first meeting with him—wearing a ski mask in a room with a dead body—failed to inspire confidence. She must have dreamed last night. The reality of what she’d gotten into suddenly came home to her.
    If she failed to deliver, who knew what this man might do. On the other hand, if she did come through, maybe he’d give her a bullet in the heart instead of seven hundred and fifty dollars. Furthermore, he was almost certainly doing something illegal even if it wasn’t murder—stealing corporate secrets, for instance. Or rather, getting her to do it. I think I’m in love , she thought. Why the hell am I so pessimistic?
    And then: Is that the beginning of a poem?
    Quickly, she wrote it in the notebook of first lines she kept in her backpack.
    When she discovered the encryption, she’d quickly developed a plan—in fact, recognized instantly that there was only one course of action. She had to get Robert Tyson to reveal the unscrambler key, which would probably be pretty easy. She could just ask him about the fascinating project he’d been working on before they put him on tech duty, and he’d talk, and eventually, he wouldn’t be able to resist demonstrating just a few little things. He would probably draw the line at actually showing her the key,